Telangana police on trail of more IS suspects

Hyderabad: A nationwide hunt has been launched for a youth who is suspected to have got in contact with IS recruiter Afsan Jabeen alias Nicky Joseph, through her group chat rooms on social media. Telangana police are on the lookout for two more men from Hyderabad whom she had motivated to join IS. 

Police suspect that apart from Telangana, Jabeen might have tried to attract youths from Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Bihar and other states. Till Friday evening, Jabeen denied her role as a IS recruiter. 

Police said that she had several FB accounts that she used to popularise IS ideology and motivate youths to join the terror group. Police are also trying to find who her handlers were and the finances of the social media recruiting module.

While chatting online, Jabeen, posing as a British national, allegedly lured several youths, promising to marry them if they travelled to Dubai, from where they would get to Syria to fight for the IS.

A senior police official said, “The accused Afsan Jabeen started a chat group, ‘Christianity versus Islam’, and was chatting with several youths including those from Hyderabad. Some of them left the group after a week. However, we have information that she was in constant touch with at least two youths from Hyderabad who are now under our radar. Definitely Salman Moinuddin was not alone among her prospective recruits.”

Jabeen meanwhile denied to the police that she wanted to marry Salman. She said it was Moinuddin who had proposed to her, which she did not accept. 

Salman Moinuddin had started a Facebook page ‘Daula News Room’ on which he had posted lots of fundamental material. He had been arrested based on information from American intelligence agencies. Moinuddin’s father had earlier denied his son’s role in the case. 

Jabeen is salman’s associate

A Hyderabadi woman, Afsha Jabeen, suspected of being a recruiter for the IS, was arrested on Friday by the Cyberabad police at the Shamshabad international. Police said she was an associate of Salman Moinuddin of Bazarghat in Hyderabad, an engineer who did his MS in Houston in US. Salman was arrested in January 2015 by Cyberabad police for suspected IS links.

According to Shamshabad DCP A.R. Srinivas, Jabeen was arrested as she was Accused No. 2 in Salman’s case, which was registered under the Prevention of Unlawful Activities Act and Information Technology Act.

Salman was trying to go to Syria via Dubai and Turkey to join IS. Police said Salman had claimed that Jabeen (who had lured him as British national Nicky Joseph) was his girlfriend and he wanted to marry her.

However, it later came to light that Jabeen was actually a Hyderabadi. She had migrated to Abu Dhabi as a child and after doing her Intermediate there, had returned to Hyderabad. 

She had graduated from Shadan College. Later, she married Devender Batra alias Mustafa who converted to Islam. The two relocated to Abu Dhabi and he started working as an employee in a real estate company. Intelligence agencies are interrogating Jabeen regarding her IS role and other terror links.